The Effects of Stress on Our Bodies

This week and last week have been quite stressful for the both of us. It is a full break from color guard, which is extremely stressful (but also relaxing because yay free time) because we need to practice in order to stay rehearsed on our parts. Also, we’ve been playing catch-up from the two days we missed from school because of our color guard trip to Las Vegas. ALSO also, this week is the last week before spring break, so all of our teachers have been piling on tests and quizzes and homework so that we don’t have to do it over the break (or forget what we’ve been learning in class).

We have also been doing a bit of research on the effects of stress on the body. There’s a really great video on YouTube by ASAP Science: Click for video

This video explains how daily stress, like tests or taxes, can trigger the same hormonal response as getting chased by a bear. The only problem is that we don’t know how to stop stressing out, so we get a higher blood pressure, pulse, and blood sugar, which can cause things like heart disease or diabetes. It goes into pretty good detail, and helps show how important your parents and friends are in keeping stress under control.

Not all stress is bad, actually. Your body is built to respond to stimuli, telling it when to stop releasing hormones and when to start again. For example, being near your family tells your brain to stop releasing the stress hormone cortisol, while stressful situations tell it to release it. It’s nice to have someone help you and support you through rough times. Also, when you’re being cornered by a bear, stress helps you have that fight-or-flight response, and makes you able to think quickly and survive in bad situations.

Our lives have kind of stayed at a pretty constant level of stress, even with new stressors and events. We know our bodies, and know what works for us, and that’s awesome. You should try to figure out what works for you so you can help yourself. But the most important thing, our goal in this project, is to help everyone with their stress and help find the role of extracurriculars in stress. So, in order to make this helpful for everyone, we’ve made a survey to see what you do for an extracurricular and how it affects your stress. We are both in the same sport, and are pretty biased towards it, so we want to know how other sports or activities affect your stress. We’d really appreciate your feedback, as it will help us in our quest for everyone’s peace of mind!

Click here for the survey! (send it to your friends too and other schools especially)

Noticing Patterns

These past two weeks have been very stressful so we really have had to use those stress reliefs techniques we learned to not get too overwhelmed. Our project is to see the roles that extracurriculars play in our stress levels, and right now those are causing a large amount of our stress, but not the unhealthy kind we notice we get from schoolwork, a more productive type of stress that motivates us to do well. Noticing that different type of stress just highlights what we have learned in our health unit about how some stress is good for you but it is the chronic stress, like grades and school, that take a harmful toll on the body.

What have we learned about ourselves? Well that means individual responses from both of us.

Gillian:

I have learned in this time that having a focus for the stress like practicing color guard and getting better, can be easily dissipated through doing color guard and knowing I am making progress. If practicing becomes stressful, taking a break and going at it later rather than overworking it does do wonderful things for the anxiety and also outcome. With school it's much harder to dissipate that stress because you can't be relaxed until you have taken the test, and found out your grade, and a lot of the time the grade causes even more stress rather than relaxation. This chronic stress has taken a noticeable physical and emotion toll that is not healthy for a high school student. I plan on finding a way to minimize that school stress for the rest of the year.

Amelia:

I’ve learned so far that if i just take it one day at a time and stay in the moment—something our color guard instructors tell us every day—to stay calm and perform well, and don’t worry about what might come next or why I messed up a few seconds before. Also, this week has been very stressful because we have to go to Las Vegas for a competition. I figured out that planning stuff out on a to-do list helps me calm down and feel accomplished. It also reduces my stress because 1) I like scribbling things out and 2) I have fewer things to worry about. If you’re someone who has a lot of things going on in their life right now, I highly suggest making a schedule or calendar of some sort to organize your life. So, color guard has really helped me de-stress my life, which shows that at least for me so far, extracurriculars are beneficial to my stress levels. I’m going to continue with these techniques and maybe find a few more as we move on with our experiment.

A set back we have had is mainly time; time to focus on stress relief, time to do homework, time to practice color guard, and time to do this project too. Now that the guard season is drawing to an end we will have a bit more time but AP exams are coming up and that means a lot of stress from friends if not our own classes so we are going to have to figure out how to deal with that. Now that we have a feeling of the patterns in our lives, we are going to start seeing how other people extracurriculars play into their stress to see if it is similar or different to our own thoughts. The ways we have managed our stress is something that can easily translate to any other activity so I guess that the lesson of these two weeks is to take your days one step at a time and stay in the moment.